The depressing thing about the AR Awards for Emerging Architecture every year is how good the winning schemes are. Because the even more depressing thing about them is how rarely they’re in Britain. The Awards have a global reach which makes them far more indicative of the state of architecture than the British-based Stirling Prize, or the Pritzker Prize — which only really goes to the stars. By contrast the AR Awards each year are the biggest (£15,000), and most truly international awards for young (for which read, under 45) architects. They’ve been going for years, but in the age of unquestioning devotion to icon architecture, their winners — usually unstarry, un-gargantuan, but always damned clever buildings, addressing very human, social, environmental needs — have long seemed simply perverse, fogeyish, almost betraying the enlightened, but once rather unzeitgeisty proclivities of their sponsor, Architectural Review magazine. When there’s a fashionable rising superstar’s computer generated, megabucks art gallery to lavish awards on? Who’d pick a willowy community project or a tea house in Japan?

This time round, though, after a year in which environmental and societal issues have been hauled up the political agenda across the world, even within architecture - supposedly the form of culture most connected to social and political topics, yet so often one ruled simply by money and ego - the AR awards, with their tendency towards good honest, well made, but still ambitious projects, seem not perverse, but stunningly prescient. China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan apart, there’s a shift among many young architects away from flash, if lucrative, bling buildings and towards, what? The uniconic? The spiritual leader of this not-quite-movement, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, calls it slow architecture. Like slow food, this is about local produce that tastes good. It’s about that hard-to-define idea, integrity. Architecturally, it means back to basics building: providing beautiful shelter, addressing human needs with architecture which has longevity and presence, undeniably modern but also showing the mark of human hand. Its response to the bombast, fakery and crash-bang-wallop of globalisation is radical in its reactionariness.

In this year’s runners and riders in the AR Awards, for instance, you’ll find not skyscrapers and bling, but a beigel-shaped kindergarten in Tokyo with a huge rooftop playground, Madrid’s beautiful memorial to 2004’s Al Qaida bombings, a low-cost school for South Africa. This is tactile architecture, architecture that speaks of its social, environmental and spiritual obligations. There are big projects, even, to dispel accusations of fogeyishness: Beijing’s massive National Aquatics Centre for next year’s Olympics by Chris Bosse/PTW Architects. There’s even a "highly commended" British project to keep the home fires if not burning, then glimmering — Thomas Heatherwick’s East Beach Café, Littlehampton.

But it’s this year’s three winners (three, note — no star-building prima donnas here) that exemplify the shifting zeitgeist: low in budget, high in cunning and in ethics. The first, "Air trees" by Ecosistema Urbano Arquitectos in a new suburban estate in Madrid, comprises a series of lightweight metal drums raised on zigzag columns, stuffed with plants of a size and type picked by the neighbourhood. The combined effect, of course, encourages community cohesion through its creation. But, more importantly, they simply cool the parched streets down, through the plants transpiration, and the shape of the pavilions, which funnel air down to the ground, is a low-tech way of ameliorating an ever-rising problem in Mediterranean cities facing the effects of global warming.

The second winner also greens the sweating city, but is even simpler — beams of vegetation installed across a cutting in the cityscape in cramped Tokyo by Taketo Shimohigoshi, turning unused overlooked space into an impromptu skygarden. The third, though, is the cleverest. It’s another take on the "one-off-house-that-could-be-mass-produced" schtick that’s been modernism’s staple diet for decades, only given a "slow architecture" twist: this is almost architecture without architects. Chilean firm FAR: Frohn & Rojas have created a form that could be made with largely unskilled labour, yet which remains architecturally ambitious, several steps up from a favela shack. It’s made from layers, like a Russian doll. First a small concrete "cave" at its heart. Second, hung from this, a prefabricated series of rooms made from glulam — a reinforced plywood. Third, wrapping the whole, a polycarbonate skin. And fourth, an "energy screen" hung over the whole like a tent to shield it from the burning sun. It proves that the most exciting architecture in the world doesn’t have to be big, but it is clever. And unfortunately it isn’t rising on these shores — rather in South America, Spain, Japan and Scandinavia, where today’s new stars are emerging. This is what REAL architecture is about, this and a word you wont be hearing much of this year in China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan, or, indeed, Britain: humanity.

Emerging Architecture is at the Royal Institute of British Architects (0207 580 5533, architecture.com) until February 28

AR awards for emerging architecture 2007

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